Each installation features a sequence of eighty 35-mm slides in a Kodak Carousel slide projector: a film in fragments. In both, a series of statements in bright yellow acts as subtitle to highly determined background images.

Untitled (Interview) (2011) is the earlier work, assembling colour images from online sources chosen for their indexical or documentary quality: a scientific diagram, a car part for sale, a backyard pool. Superimposed on this “information,” Canini’s text fragments present a puzzling counterpoint. Intentionally, we are left adrift; the words defy direct linkage with the images despite their expected role as commentary. Though forceful and replete with specific information, this silent voice speaks of the recent past from a shifting, uncertain point in time.
—PG

The later Untitled (Lecture) (2012) presents black-and-white, collaged architectural photographs taken in Canada and the UK, again with yellow subtitles. While these words construct a coherent, fictional narrative, the meaning remains fractured and the temporal siting uncertain. Boundaries between past and future are slippery here, and the stories seem claustrophobic, alienated, acknowledging their lack of agency despite the mass of data at hand. These are works endemic to a post-Internet present and permanent postwar reality, a thoughtful and ambivalent response to the superabundance of forecasting and fear-mongering, impossible to translate into meaningful knowledge.
—PG

Born in Guelph, ON, in 1975, Mikko Canini is an artist and writer living in Toronto. He has exhibited internationally, in Urbicide, Workshop, Venice, Italy (2012); Cosmophobia, L’Atelier – Kunst(spiel)raum, Berlin (2012); Jet Black White Noise, Xero, Kline & Coma, London (2011); and A Theatre to Address: In Excessive Structure, Cartel, London (2010), among others. His work has also been screened in Late at Tate: The Real Thing, Tate Britain, London (2008); In a Manner of Speaking, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2009); and New Work UK: The Sensible Stage, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2008).

Recent publications include a series of images for Spike Art Quarterly 35 (Spring 2014) and an essay in the forthcoming book Realism Materialism Art, Sternberg Press, Berlin.

Videos

BNLMTL 2014 - Panel with Mikko Canini, Lynne Marsh and Simone Jones

BNLMTL 2014 is presented by La Biennale de Montréal and co-produced with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal